Monday, 31 December 2012

These were old when life
was young and bear no sign of age. Each seems quite new and freshly
made. You imagine polishing hands wringing each gleam from the liquid
shard-like spikes, then wandering off, just as you arrive, to leave
it shining whitely in the butter-yellow light.

Not all the Radialaria
were fossilised in precambrian ooze, or leant their genes to species
yet to be. Some survived, exceeding their design. An unpredicted
maladaption cracked their genes and killed them as a breed. But kept
them as one thing. The humming engine of evolution, unchained from
sex, went mad inside the cell.

These are not the
children of the creatures of old. They are the very thing. The same
anonymous cell that floated in the worlds first sea, but still alive,
and vast.

The liquid crystal has a
hippo's mass, but packed with mind. It needs the size to store its
plans. Neither predator or prey, the Radiolarian has two to three
million years of survival oriented molecular memory held in
recombinant chains. It cannot think. They have no brain as you would
understand, but acts, reacts, adapts, recalls. The surviving
Mega-larians have faced almost every threat that life can face, and
many lost to time. They know it all.

Sometimes they need to
eat.

They move like leaves,
dancing down a street in wind. Corrugated edges kissing at the
ground. Or spooky children racing in a twilight park. They're light,
or seem so till they hit, pinning you bloody on the rock. The liquid
spikes like supple knives curl round. They drink your blood. You
watch the red mist briefly in the gem. Then gone, like match-smoke
patterns in an opened room. They need your GATTICA spirals to wipe
clean, and re-record with threats they've yet to face.

Careful observation of a
Radiolarian before or during combat, can give you clues to the kind
of threats present in the local volume. A beast begrimed with ice
might have fought the Ignimbrite Mites, a creature wild with
multicoloured light may have duelled the Eigengrau.

Radiolaria will adapt to
any blow, spell or tactic, no matter what it is, the moment after it
is used, or, if the players are being boring, the moment before.
Interesting players may survive. Dull ones never will. Plans don't
count. The Radiolarian already has all the plans. Innovation counts.

I
have a problem with this thing. It's already a blind, climbing, cave
dwelling spider with awful hooks that point each limb. And it's real
name is actually Trogloraptor, which is better than anything I was
going to come up with. I was going with 'Hook Spider'.

There's
almost nothing I can add to make this more charismatic or unnerving
than it already is.

Perhaps
it carries children on its back as eggs. Like anyone's children.
Yours maybe. Attacks like a hook horror with eight legs. Intelligent.
Translucent ochre. Needs more kids to put its eggs inside. And the
kids are still alive and crying for help. Because that's it's hunting
tactic. It eats the parents when they come looking.

Obviously
I'm making it giant, and self-aware. Though I'm tempted not to as the
child-egg-bait thing almost seems more horrible as a fucked up
hyper-specific evolutionary tactic. So maybe as smart as an Orca or a
wolfpack.

The
sound of weeping children in the darkness is a classic. Because you
know there are kids to be rescued. And you know the only reason you
can hear them is because Trogloraptor is hunting you and it wants to
draw you in. I'm imagining one long slender limb curving up over its
own back to gag a weeping child that's bound in silk. It stares down
from the wall, watching the lanternlight pool, waiting for you to
approach.

Saturday, 29 December 2012

The
shell is pearlescent, beautiful and elliptical, like two contact
lenses pressed together, edge to edge. It's four feet high and almost
sharp. The lantern light collects, reflects from ridges, barely
discernible rock-splash ripples. The curving shell-tip wobbles softly
and slowly side to side. They herd in groups where lichen drips from
limestone cracks and lick the rock with agonising care.

They
remind you of yachtsails, anchored in ranks on a dark and windless
sea, a windowless room of broken metronomes. They clack, and tap,
off-rhythm in the dark.

The
tortoise heads, and snouts, that poke below are pale, like everything
here, and (if possible) slower and more careful than the real thing.
Craning and stretching like failed origami. It takes twenty years for
the shuffling ToRaptoise to lick its fill from a vein of slow-growing
abyssal lichen. It speeds up fucking quickly though, when it wants
to.

When
meat is scented, grazing pauses for a moment, the shells half-turn,
the eyeless heads curl round and gossamer vipertounges lick patterns
in the air. If meat is strong they stop, and lick again. If meat is
weak, and they will always know when meat is weak, the shivering
starts.

The
heart rate climbs an hundredfold within a minutes time. The raptors
shake and buzz like junkies. The shells begin to clack clack clack,
then crash like fallen dishes, hum like bicycle rims, then whine like
bees. The muscled upper legs extend, babyflesh wet. The shell tilts
up, the foot-worn frontal knuckles crack, uncurling fresh/old claws
that climb. The head comes up, whistling one continuous circular
breath. The jaws extend. The tongue whips out in motion-capture sine
wave blurs.

This
creature will burn a century of slowly hoarded calories in one
hour-long high-speed underground hunt. If the pack fails to down its
prey they can all die of starvation, sometimes within a few minutes
of each other. The shell is almost inaccessible even after death, the
ToRaptoise is denied even the cannibals dividend. They fight
together, they die together, they cannot be broken once a hunt has
begun. They will bet, in their animal way, every single second of a
quiet centuries-long life on one brutal super-fast fight. You or
them.

Friday, 28 December 2012

These
are from the dawn of life itself, when RNA bounced around centreless
cells like tapedecks in the 80's, recording and exchanging.

The Archea are an
ancient Phylum, exiting the common path before even fungi and plants
separated. These cells bet their lives on strange transformations in
impossible environments and lifespans in the aeons. Slow, sombre
molecular clocks ticking with the speed of funeral bells. They feed
on things nothing else can feed on, in places nothing else can live.

They haunt volcanic rims
and know the terrors of the Igneous Wrath and see the hunts of
Pyroclastic Ghouls. Albino crabs that bathe in sulphur fumes from
deep-sea vents might startle at the touch of pale metallic fingers,
climbing precisely and blindly up out of the boiling smog and into
the abyssal sea. In pressure-liquid lakes a mile beneath sub-arctic
frozen seas a ferrous-copper eye might blink. On xenolith interior
moons. In mines. Between rocks and within them. Without light.
Without heat. Without time. They feast on radiation, blackness, and
great silence.

A kind of elaborate
rare-metal corsetry, like bones designed in dreams or armour made
ablative to the eye. Within: a kind of bubbling gas/plasma hybrid
thickening impossibly at room temperature like mercury reversed, a
gas that flows and holds its form. A stained-glass window burned with
copper-gold, the pigments not quite mixed, melted in a snake that
drips from vacant frames and almost cool, slowing almost
imperceptibly. Colours in the hundreds. A face and flame-like top, an
oil-slick halo of metallic fumes. This is the form of the Archean.

They are not elemental,
magical, alien or divine. They are simply a slow product of time and
life, evolutions children just as you.

We know very little
about the Archeans. They are old, indifferent, and need little from
us. They are, for the most part, outside the cycle of organic life.
We know they tend the Atomic Bees and seek the deadly honey. They can
speak the language of the rust-monster, or perhaps of the symbiotic
bacterial stacks that ride them. They know the Ooze.

They are slow but
stabbing an Archean is like assaulting a lion with a pork chop.
Weapons don't last long. Photon-blind, the caves are blurred to them.
Tachyons and cosmic rays don’t interact with rock too much. The
ultra high-energy low-frequency particles they sense makes their
sight more like hearing in definition and sharpness. But their
sensitivity to the deep radiations of creation means their sense of
cosmology is very advanced. They can see the still expanding primal
fires of the universe very well.

Archean Lithomomers use
different strata of rock to lens cosmic rays, this lets them see
things close-to and make shadow inferences about the nature of
surface cultures on their own world. The better the Lithonomer, the
closer they can see. Some even claim they can see the shadows of
people, moving around up there. Radical Archeans are amazed and
impressed at the rapid-burn super-fast turnover and micro-lifespans
of light dwelling organic beings. They have questions about they kind
of culture that can survive when its constituent members die every 80
years.

They may seek to speak
to you, but they don't really understand that you are a whole thing.
They think of you as something between a hive member and a
meme-transmitter.

Likely questions of the Archean
radicals.

1- Have you spoken to
the sun?

2- Why identical forms
for many*1 but constant changes*2, why not individual forms for all
and less change?

3- Where do the cities
go? Are you a cancer of the cities, did they make you?

4- Is 'food' something
you are or something you do.
This is unclear.

5
– What is your understanding of 'land' during its mid-magmatic
state. I.e after being magma, before becoming magma again? Is there
'ownership' of this 'land'?

6-
What is 'weather'? Why do the mountains die? Why is there a limit to
lens-size? Can this 'weather' be stopped? Can you stop it?

*1 They mean species.
They don't really fully understand what a species is.

Thursday, 27 December 2012

These are virtually
human, only about a million years old. Cave-salamander people. Long
white bodies, seven feet tall and slender as a child. You could
almost fit your hands around their waist. Elongated limbs with small
child-like three fingered hands. Bright vibrant gill tufts like
rose-head ruffs, Elizabethan punks. Slender tails.

Their faces are blank,
eyeless and beautifully shaped. Red vertical nose-slits shiver open
when they leave the water. Almost-lipless mouths that gawp a
centimetre, showing sharp pinteeth and indecent pink tongues. They're
kind of hot, but in a way you'll never mention to anybody else
because they'll think your mental or perverted.

Bodies weave endlessly
like slow sine waves from a dreaming mind. They appear to drift but
they can feel movements in the air. Faces and bodies thick with
invisible hypersensitivity.

As you swing your weapon
towards them they drift aside. Like being impossibly dodged by an old
old man. But if you can see, you have the advantage. In air count
them as unarmoured. When they slip into the water, it's like gifting
them an extra sense, AC as plate. The whole wrap of stream around
them becomes another organ of discovery.

They have the same
intelligence and emotional complexity as humans, but shaped by a dark
world of endless famine and a braille-wise underculture of
ultra-sensory contemplation.

They can learn and speak
other languages. The only time you'll ever hear them is when they
speak your tongue to trade, or the faint whistle-pitched mouth clicks
of a war party as it emerges from the flow in the darkness.

They know what sight is
and they are not stupid. They think about it the same way you and I
think about allen keys or fishknives. Clearly very useful in a highly
limited set of circumstances, but a fucking bitch to carry around
with you and a poor use of resources. They will trade when necessary,
or to accomplish sight-useful goals.

Protean reasons for
trade:-

1 Identifying something
in the distance of an airy space that cannot be climbed.

2 Chief has a new
status-signifier-item, is meeting with sighted peoples, needs to know
if the 'colours' have dignity. But you have to describe it in terms
he can understand.

3 Bad air is killing us.
Follow us through the area, watch your 'lantern' tell us if the flame
changes 'colour'.

4 Games for the feast,
stand ten meters away, we change position, and again, now tell us
which one of us is which. HOW DO YOU DO THAT?!?!

5 Radical touch-bard
needs new sense-words, is seriously angling for a classy new mate,
needs to knock it out of the park at the great gathering, is willing
to cross weird cultural boundaries to come up with stuff no-one has
felt before.

6 Shaman saw colours
after mushroom dream-flight, needs someone to talk him down, but
no-one understands. Like Grant Morrison after he met the 5th
dimensional aliens in Katmandu.

Cambrimen

Imagine
six gigantic fat translucent milky cells in a tube about five feet
high. Then two stalks poking out the top. Each stalk made of three
thinner cells in another tube, and where they meet at the top, a
bunch of six foot antennae and some kind of boiled-egg sensory thing.

The
Cambrimen were the first attempt of eukaryote cells at a human shape.
But life didn't have enough genetic complexity to build anything
good, so they ended up like this. They don't look like creepy primal
cthuloid entities, they look fucking useless.

You
can actually see the cell core floating around in there like a murky
walnut. If you held in in your hands you'd feel your palms tickle as
their crap analogue genes divided.

Pathetic,
failed beings. Legs barely differentiated. If they stand still too
long the legs grow back together. Just a stupid tube really. Chatter
and wander around like fucking idiots. Nothing wants to eat them
because their stupid giant cells just mash like jelly. Even oozes
won't touch them. So so so hard to kill because simple makeup means
no nervous system, so no trauma damage. No complex biological
transmitters means no poison. Can't drown. Can't breath. Barely grows
old. Has something like a pseudo-culture, like a subnormal child
reading the back of a book upside down because it's seen you do it.

Attacks
as a 1 HD monster. Has 5-8 HD. Takes hours and hours to kill as it
flails at you uselessly.

Wednesday, 26 December 2012

Long ago it was thought
that certain degenerative diseases, apparently immune to medicine,
could be cured by sufficient clean cold air.

This lead to an exodus
of victims to brighter climes. The sick thronged, muttering and
promenading, by clear seas and cold hills. But, some doctors doubted
the clarity of even these infusions.

They settled on caves.

Caves breath after all,
and the deeper and larger the cave then the longer and more powerful
the breath. What could be safer, more regenerating than to bask in
the cool airs in the womb of the earth itself?

Things did not go as
planned. Within a few weeks of total darkness the body's immune
system drops to zero. This, and other strange qualities of the
darkness lead to unexpected reactions in the interred, violent
reactions.

When the plague victims
were finally forced back into the cave system, a wall was built to
hold them there. That was many many years ago, but they still wander
the underground. The same individuals. You can sometimes hear their
endless muttering as they engage in pleading negotiations with the
disease that now preserves and animates them.

Monday, 24 December 2012

A
clanking patchwork of clay and stone. The rough form of a man formed
by a hundred hands*. The statue pieces that make his body are ruined
scraps from the fallen idols of cities lost beneath the earth.

The
hands arranged to strike down gods that eyes were carved to see. The
chest a daemons, weirdly shaped. One leg of marble made to hold up
worlds, the other treading snakes as ancient foes. The curling
serpents carried still upon the toes, and worn with endless tread but
writing still. The nose, patrician emperors the chin, a saints, the
hair, arranged from naiads, nymphs and fools.

This
creature questing endlessly and lost within it's memories halls. But
filled with fiery purpose to some end, and knowing absolutely it was
made for some great act. Or condemned for crimes it can't recall.

It
may be right.

(mashed
up collective memories of a dozen cultures could perhaps be useful to
adventurers.)

Sunday, 23 December 2012

Vampires
cannot die. Long ago, in pre-history, they infested the earth so
totally that they swarmed starving beneath the soil on every
available surface and piled in the seas abyssal deep beneath the
reach of the suns rays.

Ultimately
nature revolted against this grotesque perversion and, somehow, in
one blinding flash, they were totally destroyed.

When
they were finally wiped out there were so many that the calcite
remains formed an entire geological strata. But time has eroded and
folded them so now the thin band of pale rock that is the only
remnant of the first great age of vampires is only another geological
phenomena.

But,
still, they cannot die. Very occasionally one was fossilised wholly
enough that, millions of years later, freed by erosion and decay, it
can wriggle loose from the soft rock.

The
fossilised stone skeleton of a precambrian vampire. Cracked and
deranged by its entombment. Utterly totally insane.

Saturday, 22 December 2012

We
can think of culture, the product of civilisation, as a living thing.
Then consider the means of culture to seek it's own survival.

Those
means will include a freight-train sized centipede.

The
Civilopede is a scavenger/predator. When the cities of the Underdark
burn and fall, the Civilopede arrives to hunt through the wreckage,
discover and preserve the artefacts and records, and ruthlessly hunt
the survivors.

A
few librarians and archivists are spared, they enter into a symbiotic
relationship with the Civilopede, becoming its back-riding
teamster-curators.

The
nerdy remnants of every race swarm on the creatures hide, arranging
and re-arranging the endless piles of art, artefacts, museum pieces,
records, writing and treasure. Anything you could find in a gallery,
museum, archive or library will be stored there.

The
only place in the Underdark that culture could be preserved in this
way is by something big, scary, violent and dangerous enough to keep
it safe.

The
Civilopede never stops moving in its endless perambulations beneath
the earth. It can be mounted, with great danger and risk. The
curators will turn against any invaders unless they bring or produce
culture, so boarders can exist safely, but trapped in a kind of
endless salon. Decadent aristocrats of civilised races sometimes try
to board for exactly this reason.

Friday, 21 December 2012

Long
white, looks like a lion on meth. Blind. Claws drip slowly with
Alkhest, the universal solvent. Can ultimately claw its way through
anything.

Lives
in vast alkali caverns formed from the decayed rock it scraped away
to form its lair. Salt-mine warrens are its hunting ground.

Has
symbiotic relationship with fungal spores that form its ruff. Like a
host of dandelion seeds, but six or seven feet long and projecting
forwards, you cant really see its face. When the lion hungers a few
spores break off and float off half-intelligent like dandelion seeds
on the wind. Wandering through caverns. When they find flesh, the
lion awakes and follows.

Empty
white salt tunnels with occasional bright spiked floating seeds
caught in the lanterns glow. The seedstems flex and bend towards you
as if alive. You turn back but then there's another, and another and
another.

Thursday, 20 December 2012

A
cave bear made of clay. The head a stump, a chunk of wood jammed in
the neck hole, and on it, the skull of an ancient bear. Made by our
ancestors and imbued with magic from the hunt. The holes in its clay
sides were made by spears and javelins as they danced around it,
maybe some fragments of ancient wood still remain within.

It's
clay claws won't cut but can smash bone. It is waiting for the song
to complete so it can go back to being earth, but the culture that
sang it is dead for thirty thousand years. If you know the song and
can dance the dance like the shaman of old then dance it and calm the
bear. Otherwise the hunt goes on.

Wednesday, 19 December 2012

A
killer shark that has symbiotically bonded with a huge slime. Can
move freely around out of water. Skin dissolved, organs floating free
in a kind of pale yellow amniotic bath. Cartilage skeleton curling
upright as if in prayer. Jaws and jaw muscles kind of hovering in a
halo above the skeleton. Whole thing moves fast like putty sliding
down a windowscreen. First the slime pulls you in then the sharkjaw
slooowly lowers itself over you and sloowly bites down. Then the
shark and slime share your calories.

Tuesday, 18 December 2012

Giant
caddis fly larvae that builds its tube-like shell from metal and
lives long in underground rivers. The only metal that won't
eventually corrode in these conditions is either gold or magical
steel.

The
shell of the Castellian Caddis Fly is made up of shields, swords,
spears and other weapons of legend. All washed clean of markings by
the rivers flow. A shell of blades. Each one was the legendary blade
of a particular culture or hero-cycle, made to kill gods and defeat
evil. But eventually forgotten and lost. The shell is more dangerous
than the fly inside it. Heaves itself up out of the white water,
plumes of foam spilling on its spiked and shining sides.

When
the fly needs new stuff for its shell. It finds the river system
below a climax culture and waits a few thousand years for it to
decline. Once the museums have burned and the hero's are dead, the
blades will be forgotten and lost. Eventually they will end up in the
water sink and the fly will recover them.

Monday, 17 December 2012

The
Nightmare Whale. An insane, screaming, albino, telekinetic whale.
Yeah Moby Dick had psychic powers, you surprised? Surface beings
rarely meet these creatures from the under-ocean. Sometimes they go
fucking crazy and get trapped in a nightmare they can't wake up from.
Their telekinesis means they lift out of the ocean and, vertical in
the air, heave screaming through the underdark, wailing crazed songs
in ultrasonic.

You
could try killing them, or waking them up. But who understands the
dreams of whales? Surrounded by the force-ghosts of squid the whale
is imagining tormenting it, and which are actually attacking
everything around. Not a city destroyer, but maybe a killer of towns.

Sunday, 16 December 2012

White
spindly troll encrusted with fungi which is itself symbiotically
bonded to rare archean bacteria. These produce rare metals and
impossible elements at a slow rate and encode them in micro-helixes
inside the fungi. Like a polar bears hair has a spiral inside it that
refracts infra-red. These things refract time. Troll looks kind of
crazy and beautiful with weird glintings inside its fungal lumps.

Tachyon
Troll starts at 1 hp. Looks all fucked up, like its just been in a
fight. You have to fight it. If you don't the temporal energy
released will slowly kill you until you do. Each blow restores hit
points. When it reaches max it's regeneration kicks in. The troll
knows all possible futures for itself and this has given it
buddha-like wisdom. It doesn't hate you. It's trying to kill and eat
you because this is the tao of the troll. Speaks calmly in gnomic
parables while you fight it. Reassures you. Accepts death calmly when
it comes. It was always fated to end this way. Maybe surviving a long
fight with one gives you a new perspective on life, possible WIS
bonus, free alignment change or life insight.

Sunday, 9 December 2012

“It
attained the size of a bull, but the bones of an Ox look fragile
compared to a cave bear's. It's muscles must have been huge, judging
by the muscular insertions of the bone; it's canine teeth were the
size of bananas.

It
penetrated to great depths, exploring the most out-of-the-way
crannies.

...

Even
in narrow vertical passages, where one can climb only by hitching
oneself up like a chimney sweep, I have been surprised to find bear
traces on walls covered with clay or delicate stalagmite. Sometimes
long scratches tell of desperate efforts and dangerous slides:
sometimes, too, I have found skeletons at the foot of pits or steep
walls.

Eleven
hundred yards from the entrance to the cavern of Montespan the bears
noticed a narrow gallery opening ten feet above the water. Thanks to
their great size they were able to put their forepaws in the opening,
but a layer of soft clay makes the place peculiarly difficult to
climb into.

Nothing
could be more curious and striking than the many long scratches in the
clay, which shows the bears obstinate attempts to hoist themselves
into the tunnel. We can imagine the beasts falling back heavily into
the water, growling as they got up to try again. Some of them
succeeded in entering the corridor, which grows smaller after fifty
feet. Here their size prevented them from going further, and they
clawed up the earth.

The
tunnel ends at an impassible crack after a hundred feet. At the end
of this cul-de-sac a cub, which can have been no bigger than a
poodle, has left the marks of its little claws upon the floor.

It
is not surprising that the cub continued to explore the tunnel beyond
the point where it's parents were halted, but the amusing thing,
which sheds a light on the animals habits, is that the cub could not
have climbed into the high tunnel alone. It's mother must have
strained every nerve to hoist it up.

But
not all the bears perished alike: some fled deeper than ever into the
caverns ... the penetrating damp of the caverns caused a degenerative
disease, whose stages are strikingly shown by the monstrous lesions
of the bones still found in the caverns … There are deformed jaws,
joined vertebrae, shoulder blades encrusted with bony tumour, long
bones distorted by a sort of arthritis and sometimes grown
together..”

I
can't stop imagining them penetrating deeper and deeper into the
earth, slowly changing.

The Tachyon Troll is already badly woulded from the fight your about to had, but if you dont heal it with the edge of your blade the temporal distortion will kill you with years. Plus, it's trying to eat you. I need 12 more so I can fill out the main encounter chart. Noisms is right. Making new monsters is hard. (My hook spider is different to his and I thought of mine first)

Veins of the Earth Hardcopy

‘They've knocked it out of the park. Hit it for six. Got it in an arm bar in the first round. Pick your sport, pick your metaphor, doesn’t matter: the point is clear – so soon after _Fire on the Velvet Horizon_, Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess prove once again that something as unlikely as an RPG supplement can be art, of the most impressive kind. An amazing work.’ - China Mieville

FIRE ON THE VELVET HORIZON

"Superpositioning with strange panache, Velvet Horizon is an (outstanding) indie role-playing-game supplement, and an (outstanding) example of experimental quasi-/meta-/sur-/kata-fiction. Also a work of art. Easily one of my standout books of 2015." - China Mieville" Maybe my favourite thing we've made. If you like Scraps work click the pic.